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What is a documentary? From Nanook of the North to the Present

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The question "what is a documentary?" aims at suggesting the complexity within documentary as a film type/genre. Other questions arise from the main inquiry, like: is that different from fiction? If yes, in which terms? Is documentary a homogeneous manner to make films, or there are documentary modes? Are these modes rigidly separated or are they coexisting? Are there answers that can allow a student, scholar or film enthusiast to better understand the peculiarities of documentary films? Basically, these questions will guide the solution to this problem, considering that the debate between film critics, scholars and filmmakers is still existing, and there are no final and consensual definitions about what is a documentary.

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What is a documentary? This question might seem to be simple, but it leads to a deep and complex debate that extends itself to the entire history of Cinema, since Nanook of the North (1922) to actual days.

This solution is guiding the reader towards a more complex understanding about documentary and its own peculiarities as a film regime/dominium. The aim of this solution is to make the reader think about given and common-sense based "distinctions" made between documentaries and fiction, through examples and a brief, but intense dialogue with some of the most renowned scholars and authors interested in this matter. 

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Since the very beginning of the so-called Seventh Art (Cinema), documentaries are considered as a distinct branch of filmmaking. By a matter of fact, a documentary is different from a fiction film, but at the same time there are common aspects and differences. For instance, the first feature length documentary, in the history of filmmaking, is Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North (1922) and, in spite it's indexed as a documentary, indeed Flaherty used fictional techniques and represented the Inuit people as if they were living like their ancestors, while they weren't since a long time.

Also, Nanook's igloo was reconstructed in order to allow the director's camera (and the filmmaker himself to enter the narrow place, and finally, the Inuit's fishing technique had improved a lot since the age of their grandparents, but Flaherty required them to "pretend" fishing that way, because the director's obsession was representing man's struggle against the environment, or let's say wilderness. And that should be dramatic, while Inuit's real way of life at the time wasn't so dramatic. Basically, Flaherty adopted "mise en scène", that is a French expression meaning something that is set up or represented onto a stage (Filmmaking inherited "mise en scène" or "mise-en-scène" from theatre). ...

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